This is a very atmospheric story: although not the usual haunting. It's presented as the oral history of an up-and-coming British folk band in the 60s and the story of what happened the summer their producer sent them to a decaying manor house in the middle of nowhere to rehearse and write material for their second album.

Hand paces the story well, giving us little bits of creepiness along the way, and grounding it in the mundane: they're just broke teenagers hoping this is going to be their big chance. The house is a weird one, added onto every century or so. The villagers are stand-offish. The summer is gorgeous, the songwriting is going well, and the rehearsals are great. Just little bits of wrongness here and there.

It absolutely feels like the reminiscences of aging hippies: the sex, the drugs, the ratty old clothes. The band members have different voices and personalities, and the whole thing comes across as exactly the kind of urban legend you'd hear about a band after several decades, or a Whatever Happened to special on MTV or something.

Very well done, and a clever twist on a number of tropes. I rather like the setting (in time and space) for being not at all gothic, but rather idyllic. This is the pattern of most of E. F. Benson's ghost stories and adapted well. It'd make a gorgeous film.

Library copy

"Wylding Hall," tells the story of a group of folk-rock musicians who spend the summer of 1972 in a remote Manor House in the wilds of Hampshire to put their second album together. By the end of the summer, the lead singer, a beautiful but shy young man who is fascinated by the "Magik" with a K, Alistair Crowley style, has disappeared without a trace.

The story is told in a series of modern day, rockumentary style interviews with members of the band, their manager, a psychic girlfriend, a music journalist and local boy who briefly played roadie/photographer.

This format makes the story perfect for being turned into an audiobook. The version I listened to had a different narrator for each person being interviewed. Apart from an article written at the time by the journalist, there was no text beyond the statements made by the interviewees.

The book cuts from one interviewee to the next, revealing events with bit by bit. It's easy to imagine the once beautiful, now ageing musicians, seated against a dark background and speaking directly to camera.

The story has a paranormal feel to it but leaves room for other interpretations - just about. To me, it seemed slightly spooky rather than chilling.

What held my interest was how clearly the characters were defined by the way they gave their account of events. They were heavy on nostalgia, looking back on the golden summer of their youth and that gave me permission to be nostalgic too. I liked the way their accounts were inconsistent with one another, in the way in which any long-ago event that has since become legend will be. 

The chaotic, semi-childish, drug-enabled way the young people live in their isolated house, the fugue that they fall into when spending their whole time making music seemed real to me.

The introduction of the supernatural elements was subtle. Ideas were wound around the history of the house, the warnings contained in the old folk songs they studied, the strange woods surrounding a Long Barrow and the pictures in the local pub of Wren Hunting.

It was an entertaining way to spend four hours, although it seemed to me that the drug and sun-soaked summer of seventy-two was a stranger land to visit than any of the hinted-at faerie realms touching the house.

I'm almost done with March's reviewing and then I only have some comics to get done, which I can talk about a day!   So easy.   I'm going to force myself to catch up before I read anything new, and that's a good incentive: if I slack off too much, I fall behind on comics and I have a huuuuge stack of comics I want to read really badly. 

That being said, I've regretted not immediately reviewing Wylding Hall.  I feel like my best reviews are usually written right after the book, riding that high or anger-fueled snark that lingers but isn't quite the same as time passes.  I will, however, try to do this book justice.  On the most basic level, it's a fictional biography of a band, and what happens when their lead singer disappears right after recording their second album; years later, the band members, manager, and even the girlfriend of one of the band members tell their stories.   A local boy joins in later on, as the band was secluded in a mansion to focus on recording; only later on does the boy come into play, but, boy, is he relevant!

And this doesn't do the book justice at all, because it's so much more than a biography, or a way to use multiple view points.  It's also a mystery, fantasy, and horror, layered upon each other.   And while normally multiple viewpoints - especially this many - feel overcrowded, and even pointless at times, Hand handles them all with aplomb.   Not only that, much like she layers the genres, she layers the stories: each person brings something new, something to hook the reader, and each layer brings with it new understanding, a subtle disquiet and unease that sustains this whole thing.   

It's eerie in the way an Algernon Blackwood story is: full of wonder and horror, awe inspiring, but with no real gore or even violence throughout.   (There are images that bring about horror, like this one particular room, but the violence is never carried out in the novel itself.)

Folk songs are a pivotal part of this story, and with it comes the art of storytelling.  This could be too much of a wink, too heavy handed, too meta because it was about the artist and thus too self-involved.   It is not.   Every time Hand tells us something about the art of storytelling via folk songs, it's integral to the story, tells us something about the way we tell stories - rather than being about the artists, and it all adds up to the general malaise in this novel.   Given how much is packed into the short novel we get here, the scope is absolutely breathtaking.   And given how little time we spend with these characters, there is so much that could go wrong: they could be unlikable as Hand focused on the point of the story she tells, or they could be sacrificed at the alter of cardboard cutouts.   They are not.  She could focus on the characters, and allow that general creepiness to falter.   She doesn't do this either.  Instead, the masterful balance she achieves always comes back to make us aware that even the quiet moments are only the calm before things get creepy as fuck again. 

This story has stayed with me, not in an ever present, I can't get it out of my mind way.   I've been a little preoccupied, though.   It's stayed with me in that when I think about it, I am once again taken away to Wylding Hall, to the little moments that just build and build upon one another.   Every time I think about this book, I am more and more impressed with what Hand's done here: the amount of time, energy, detail.   The research, the weaving together of these separate tales into one cohesive whole... 

I've written before, so I know how handling something of this sort can be mind-bogglingly difficult.   And I'm not even going to pretend I'm nearly good enough to weave together something as intricate as Hand here, but it's not my result that's important here: even the attempt makes me appreciate just how delicate a story like this is.   And it makes it even more effective for me, I think.   And it's not that I was thinking this while reading; no, then I was 100% into the story.   It was when I was forced to stop reading - to work, to eat, to talk to people - that I turned my thoughts to all the ways this story could have gone sideways in the hands of a lesser writer - like me.   

Instead, Hand gives us something that works in every way.   Full characters, a lush and dangerous world and place, and an ending that sent shivers down my spine.   Love, love, love. I will be reading more Hand very soon.

Who would know that I would like a book about a occasional drug-using, petty thief, woman that's life has become stagnate after some early semi-fame. She's sent to interview one of the women she admires and finds out the woman doesn't know her and that there's some strange things happening. There's a connection between two people which I find really strange because she's not that attractive or nice but there's something about her that people like. Even with all of that, I liked the book and plan on reading the other books in the series.

Well, I was forewarned this was edgy. Our heroine, Ms. Neary, is almost unlikable.

The book is described as a mystery, but it is not presented as a mystery. Nor does the NYC hard drinking, pill-popping, post-middle-aged, bookstore stockroom clerk, briefly famous (in her 20's) photographer go looking for one.

Everyone in the book is damaged. Not as damaged as everyone in "The Panopticon", but damaged. Particularly Cass Neary.

I was drawn in by the writing and whether Ms. Neary would self-destruct as she chases amphetamines with Jack Daniels from a pint bottle.